A Record 25.2 Million Young Adults Now Live with Their Parents — not Because They Won’t Leave, But Because They Can’t Afford To.
At 25, Sarah has never lived away from her family.
“Since I came out of the womb,” she said, laughing when asked how long she had lived with her mother.
She had not expected this.
Before college, Sarah imagined that by 24 or 25 she would be looking for her first apartment. She went to Howard University, where she studied communications and economics. She completed internships. Part of the appeal of Howard, she said, was its reputation and the network that might follow her into the working world.
The expectation was familiar enough: get an education, get a job, leave home.
The first two did not produce the third.
Sarah now works as an administrative assistant for a private tax firm. She continues looking for better-paying work. But when she looks at apartments in Los Angeles and then at what she earns, she does not see a difficult budget. She sees an impossibility.
“Absolutely not,” she said when asked whether she could afford to live independently.
So she stays with her mother.
She buys groceries — about $500 a month, she estimates — and cooks and cleans. Her mother covers most of the remaining household expenses while Sarah tries to improve her financial position.
There are compromises less easily entered into a household ledger.
“You basically sacrifice all your privacy,” Sarah said.
Living with the mother who raised her means negotiating adulthood inside a relationship formed long before she became one. Where are you going? When will you be back? Questions that can seem ordinary between a parent and teenager feel different, she said, when you are in your mid-20s.
“It strips independence from you.”
Still, Sarah knows what she has.
“I’m in a very lucky position,” she said.
That distinction — between dependence and luck — is becoming increasingly important in America’s housing crisis.
A Record Number of Young Adults Are Stuck at Home
Nationally, a record 25.2 million adults under 35 lived with their parents in 2025, according to research from Realtor.com. Nearly one in three young adults now lives at home. Among those ages 25 to 34, roughly 70% are employed. The phenomenon is no longer easily explained as young people waiting around for jobs.
“Something about their income level, debt load, or the cost of housing in their market is keeping them home despite steady employment,” Hannah Jones, a senior economist at Realtor.com, said in the report.
Housing costs offer part of the explanation. The median asking rent reached $1,673 in 2025, 17.9% higher than in 2019, according to Realtor.com. The median home listing price was $430,000, up 34.4% over the same period.
The result is visible in childhood bedrooms across the country.
If young adults were living with their parents at the same rates they did in the early 2000s, Realtor.com estimates that 4.86 million fewer people under 35 would be doing so today.
They aren’t necessarily freeloading.
Seventy-two percent of young adults living with parents contribute financially to their households, according to Pew Research Center data cited by Realtor.com. Nearly two-thirds help with groceries, utilities, or other expenses, and 46% contribute toward rent or the mortgage.
In some households, adult children and parents are not so much preserving an old dependency as improvising a new economic unit: combining incomes, expenses and shelter because maintaining two separate households has become too expensive.
Jones sees two broad populations among them. There are young adults for whom living at home is temporary — a place to accumulate savings before buying or renting.
And then there is a larger group for whom, as she put it, the childhood bedroom is “less a runway and more a floor.”
Sarah is standing on that floor.
The more revealing question is what happens to someone in the same financial position when it isn’t there.
Researchers have been studying versions of that question for decades.
Housing scholars sometimes describe moving in with relatives or friends during periods of financial distress as “doubling up.” Research from the U.S. Census Bureau has found that these arrangements can function as a form of social support during periods of economic need — an informal buffer between losing one home and having nowhere to live.
Other research has found that the breakdown of doubled-up arrangements with relatives or friends can be an immediate precursor to homelessness. More recent scholarship has described this kind of family assistance as a “private safety net” — one that can absorb financial shocks before formal homelessness systems ever encounter the people experiencing them.
The protection is imperfect. Research on very-low-income families has documented some of the tradeoffs that can accompany doubling up, including diminished privacy and independence — much as Sarah describes. For families already struggling financially, taking in another adult can also shift the burden rather than eliminate it.
But it can buy something crucial: time.
For Sarah, that time is being provided by her mother.
Where the Safety Net Runs Out
For David Gillanders, much of his working life is spent near the point where that time runs out.
As executive director of Pathways of Hope, a homelessness-prevention and housing organization in Orange County, Gillanders works with people for whom a financial crisis has begun turning into a housing crisis. Before shelter, before placement in the homelessness system, there is often a simpler question:
Is there anyone you can stay with?
“I mean, that’s pretty much always our first question,” Gillanders said, “because you’d always rather prevent someone from coming into the homeless system.”
Sometimes the intervention is not a housing voucher or a shelter bed. It is repairing a relationship with a parent. Finding a relative. Persuading a friend to let somebody remain a little longer.
“A lot of it is as simple as letting them stay there,” he said.
Gillanders has seen what happens when that possibility runs out.
He calls it an “economic backslide.”
It can begin with an event — a lost job, an eviction, an unexpected expense — that dislodges someone from stable housing. A relative or friend may provide temporary shelter. But temporary shelter does not solve the arithmetic that caused the original problem. If someone’s wages cannot cover rent, saving a security deposit and first month’s rent while trying to regain stability can become its own obstacle.
Then comes another couch. A motel. A car.
Eventually, perhaps, a shelter.
“Everyone who you see on the streets pushing all of their worldly belongings was at one point going through each of these phases before they ended up there,” Gillanders said.
Employment is no guarantee against the progression.
“I can’t tell you how many people live in their cars and have jobs,” he said.
Gillanders recently worked with a man who had been employed, as was his partner, when they could no longer make the rent. They were evicted. The man ended up in a shelter, separated from his partner. He found two jobs while staying there, Gillanders said, only to suffer a serious workplace injury that left him disabled.
It is the kind of case that illustrates how little margin some working people have between earning a paycheck and losing stable housing.
“The rent’s too damn high,” Gillanders said. A job, he added, is “not a golden ticket to stable housing.”
That is what makes the millions of young adults living with their parents look different when viewed from inside the homelessness system.
They represent a housing crisis partly prevented from becoming a homelessness crisis by families.
Sarah’s life is far removed from a shelter.
She has a job, a college degree and a home. She buys groceries, cooks and cleans, looks for better work and thinks about the independence she expected to have by now.
But when her income fails to meet the cost of housing, someone else has absorbed the difference.
Her mother.
Sarah bristles at the implication that adults in her position simply aren’t trying hard enough.
“They think we’re lazy,” she said.
There was a time when living with one’s parents well into adulthood was commonly treated as evidence of a delayed launch. Sarah sees something different happening now.
“It’s actually, you’re lucky if you’re able to still live at your parents’ house,” she said.
That may be closer to the distinction that matters.
Because when Sarah was asked what she would do if her mother’s house suddenly ceased to be available, she did not describe another apartment.
“I would have to go get emergency housing,” she said.
She talked about seeking public assistance. She could not meet the income requirements she encounters in the rental market, she said, and she does not earn enough to carry market-rate housing on her own.
For now, none of that has happened.
There is still a room.
The Safety Net No One Counts
The American housing safety net is usually described through programs: rental assistance, shelters, public housing, supportive housing, emergency aid. But underneath those systems is another one, largely absent from government budgets and homelessness counts.
A mother who says yes.
A father with an extra room.
A sibling with a couch.
A family willing — and financially able — to absorb one more adult.
The size of that informal safety net is difficult to measure. Asked whether the Los Angeles Housing Department collects data on adults who lack family housing or family support to fall back on, a department spokesperson said it does not.
“That’s not the type of data that LAHD collects,” the spokesperson said.
That absence is revealing. The system can count many people once they enter homelessness. It has a much harder time counting the family arrangements that keep others from getting there.
Realtor.com’s numbers capture millions of people for whom that arrangement is still holding. They cannot tell us how many others encountered the same rents, the same wages and the same economic shock without having someone on the other side of a front door.
Gillanders sees some of them later.
By then, the question is no longer why they haven’t left home.
It is where they can go when there is no home left to return to.
Editor’s note: “Sarah” is a pseudonym. The source in this story asked that her name be withheld to protect her privacy.
